Nancy & Michael HIPEC Support

Family & Friends,

I believe that your collective outpouring of love is truly what has allowed me to share such a positive update, as your relentless encouragement and your generous supplement of meals, companionship, labor and leave time—not to mention the donation of a family vacation—has empowered Nancy and Michael to focus all of their energy on fighting not only this disease, but an exeptionally unfair and unfavorable initial prognosis.

In true Nancy form, she has defied all odds and qualified for HIPEC, the only known treatment for extending the life of those diagnosed with peritoneal carcinomatosis. Here is an awesome, yet lengthy, explanation of what HIPEC surgery entails, from the very doctor who will be performing the procedure for Nancy at Fred Hutch in Seattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQLoidyI2IE.

Nancy’s surgery is set to take place today, July 7, 2023. Being the humble people they are, Michael and Nancy have not sought financial support throughout this challenging chapter, though the financial burden has been extensive driving to and from Seattle and staying for 3-4 nights bi-weekly so that Nancy could receive her treatments from the absolute best in medicine. I have received many inquiries from you all, asking for ways in which you can provide financial support and they have finally reached that point.

Nancy’s surgery is known as “The Mother of All Operations” and her recovery will be extensive, requiring her to remain in Seattle for a month at the very least. I am hoping that we can collectively support the Alleyn family by helping fund their stay in Seattle during this process. While Nancy will remain in the hospital, Michael and the kids will need to stay in a hotel or short-term residence in Seattle to support her through her recovery and I’d like to remove that burden.

If you wish to donate to this cause, this will be our fundraising platform.

Thank you all for wrapping your arms around my brother and his beautiful family. As a follower of the teachings of the late Desmond Tutu, I leave you with his wisdom:

“In our African weltanschauung, our worldview, we have something called ubuntu. This expression is very difficult to render in English, but we could translate it by saying, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ We need other human beings for us to learn how to be human, for none of us comes fully formed into the world. We would not know how to talk, to walk, to think, to eat as human beings unless we learned how to do these things from other human beings. For us, the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.

Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. It says, not as Descartes did, ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather, ‘I am because I belong.’ I need other human beings in order to be human. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity. We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.

To be human is to be dependent.”